Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zanemunshank and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about the future of the European Green Deal. The Green Deal was the flagship

program of the first commission under Ursula von der Leyen. It led to a very, very large volume of

legislation. And right now it is meeting its pushback, a pushback,

a political pushback in the European Parliament started about a year ago, but it was still at a

very contained level. There is a big pushback happening in German politics right now. The CDU is

pushing back strongly. We hear economic commentators in

Germany urging generalized disobeying of all EU rules in order to save the German economic model

and blaming the Green Deal. But the question we want to discuss today is whether the Green Deal,

as it was conceived,

is the right approach to climate change or whether the US-based approach based on market

incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act is the more superior one.

A point we made in our news briefing is that this is not sort of an argument that

people will keep on regurgitating for very long time. There will come a point where these two

conflicting approaches will have a winner, where it will be clear which of the two will be more

successful. Right now, the EU's approach seems to be running into difficulties because companies are struggling with it.

The economic consequences were underestimated and the pushback from the corporate sector is absolutely massive.

Mostly in Germany where the whole thing started because Germany is very industrialized.

It's an industrialized economic model.

It's unsurprising that there it is where the pushback is starting.

But it was also the country that started the whole Green Deal, if it was German policy, that was

ultimately behind it. Let us start with sort of an analysis of where we are. Jack,

...